After a day or so, and following some contact with our family there, I get a bit more comfortable with the place. However, when I drive down the long streets and avenues, the thought creeps back into my mind that I am in some kind of alternate reality.
It seems there is just one dominant idea of the good life in the great sprawl that comprises Phoenix and it is replicated every few miles in each community that you pass through. Each place has a strip mall with the same collection of chain stores and fast food joints which serve as a facade for endless tracts of ranch-style homes punctuated by long-stemmed palms.
My observations and my imagination lead me to the idea that the residents of Phoenix are uniformly detached from any connection to national and international political concerns, directing their attention instead to sporting events and the acquisition of large motorized toys. That is likely an unfair judgment, but it is hard to shake the idea that Phoenicians conceive of the rest of the world as a kind of fairy tale to which they have only a remote connection.
I have to admit that ignoring the rest of the world is an understandable strategy if you feel that you have little or no real control over the course of world events. And, of course, there are a lot of nice things to be found in Phoenix. We rented a beautiful three-bedroom house for just a hundred bucks per day -- about what we would normally pay for a hotel room.
There is also the fact that Phoenix is an island in a vast and amazing desert. The saguaro cactus lend a somewhat exotic look to the land, but the endless grass-covered rolling hills, dotted with junipers and cut by shallow arroyos and steep canyons make me feel at home. It is a part of the landscape that stretches from the Snake River to the Rio Grande in which I chose to live out the better part of my life.
8 comments:
I used to be work-friends with a woman whose sister lived in Phoenix. My work-friend visited her sister for a week every year, and upon return would always comment on the vacuousness of the city: the endless strip malls, the status-consciousness and the high-end purchases to which that led people, and the looksism. "I think I'm the only woman there," she never failed to remark, "who has not undergone some form of plastic surgery." She loved to visit her sister, but was always relieved to return to Indiana where her unenhanced looks placed her among the reasonably attractive.
Sounds like Phoenix is a good place to go when you want to feel overwhelmed.
Your observations of the Phoenix area are interesting. I lived there for three decades and never quite got myself "dug in."
Half the year, it was great calling friends and relatives in the snowy climes and bragging that we were swimming on Christmas Day. The other half of the year, we hid in our homes listening to the constant drone of air conditioning compressors while the electric meters spun outside at dizzying speeds.
While I lived there, "The Valley of The Sun" grew from hundreds of thousands to millions. With no geography to contain it, Phoenix is pouring out across the desert as far as you can see. The area today more closely resembles Los Angeles than the little desert city I moved to in the mid 1980s.
My neighbor in Scottsdale used to say that Phoenix was a great place to move to if you want to just disappear. Was never quite clear what he meant by that, but your piece today brings it a bit more into focus for me.
It seems that many of our finest urban environments have undergone changes that are less than desirable. The ones I have some familiarity with are NYC, Seattle and San Francisco. I have no interest in going back to Seattle where I grew up, but San Francisco and NYC still seem interesting. However, they became unaffordable for me fifteen or twenty years ago. The last time I was in Seattle the traffic seemed impossible, and since then Amazon-induced inflation has made housing impossible as well.
I should add that Albuquerque where I have spent the last nine years is still affordable and has many amenities including close-in mountains and the Rio Grande. Unfortunately, the State and its biggest city never recovered from the 2008 economic crisis. Albuquerque now holds the title among all US cities for the greatest number of car thefts, and crime, poverty and addiction are rampant. It looks like the citizenry has been driven in its desperation to be on the verge of electing a progressive Democrat as mayor. It will be an interesting experiment.
Interesting post. Never been to Phoenix so I can't comment on Phoenix. I have noticed in my travel as across the US that you see the same stores/restaurants and types of strip malls everywhere. We always try to find a local restaurant instead of one I can eat in at home. I liked you pictures. You are certainly getting the best out of the cameras you use.
You are right that the strip mall/fast food phenomenon is not confined to Phoenix. What makes the Arizona city somewhat unique as JR points out is that it is built on a vast flat flood plain with no obvious natural boundaries to development. What will likely bring the process to an end is water shortage. Before that happens, though, a big part of the Southwest could be sucked dry.
Those Russian Leica clones just keep clicking! I have a Zorki-4 that needs a little TLC on the shutter, but otherwise they are rock solid and not too bad to work on. You seem to be getting perfect performance out of yours.
The 2C is definitely the smoothest working and most reliable of my Soviet cameras. All the old Russian cameras are bargains, but the 2C tops the list for me in terms of performance per dollar. I'm also a big fan of the Industar, FED and Jupiter lenses. I've resolved to make more use of all of them, and maybe even move into some new equipment territory in the near future.
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